Henry E. Brady

Dean and Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy

Areas of Expertise

Elections

Politics

Government

Biography

Henry Brady is Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980. He has written on electoral politics and political participation, social welfare policy, political polling, and statistical methodology, and he has worked for the federal Office of Management and Budget and other organizations in Washington, D.C. He is past president of the American Political Science Association, past president of the Political Methodology Society of the American Political Science Association, and director of the University of California’s Survey Research Center from 1998 to 2009. He is coauthor of Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) which won the Harold Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995) which won the Philip Converse Award for a book making a lasting contribution to public opinion research and the AAPOR book award for influential books that have stimulated theoretical and scientific research in public opinion, Expensive Children in Poor Families: The Intersection of Childhood Disability and Welfare (2000), and Counting All the Votes: The Performance of Voting Technology in the United States (2001). He is co-editor of Rethinking Social Inquiry (2004) which won the Sartori Award for best book on qualitative methods, Capturing Campaign Effects (2006), and the Handbook of Political Methodology (2008). His most recent book is The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy. Henry Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2003 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006.

Selected Publications

Politics, economics, and technology have conspired to make this an exceptionally challenging time for American higher education. Some critics claim that costs are out of control in traditional public and private nonprofit higher education. They believe these institutions will soon go the way of the railroads as for-profit institutions displace them and the Internet replaces college campuses and classrooms. Other critics bemoan the privatization of higher education and the increasing role of market forces. Still others think higher education has lost its way and fails to focus on educating undergraduates.

Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system. The Unheavenly Chorus is the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken—and its findings are sobering.